Hello, Larry (NBC 1979-1980, McLean Stevenson, Kim Richards)

In Hello Larry, after his divorce, sitcom dad Larry Adler moved himself and his two teenage daughters from Los Angeles to Portland, Oregon. He got a job as the host for a radio talk show, and from the looks of it, this single dad had his act together. His callers phoned in, he answered with his trademark “Hi, you’re on the air with Lar,” and then he doled out his patented funny and outspoken advice. Between calls, he joked around with portly engineer Earl and flirted with lovely producer Morgan. Easy, right?

But at home, Larry’s teenage daughters had real-life problems. They missed their mom (played by Shelly Fabares, who occasionally came to town for guest appearances), and their friends back in L.A. They had problems with boys and with kids at school who weren’t especially enamored of that brash new radio host blabbing over the airwaves who also happened to be their dad. So, the confidence with which Larry advised his callers didn’t always apply to the way he raised his own kids, and from this premise, a sitcom was born…

The tone and single-parent premise of the show was certainly reminiscent of One Day at a Time, and rightly so—executive producers Dick Bensfield and Perry Grant worked on both shows. Hello, Larry aired after another single-parent sitcom, Diff’rent Strokes, and in an attempt to boost Larry’s ratings, the network tried to inject a little of the Drummond family popularity into the Adlers. Backstory was created: Philip Drummond and Larry were in the army together, and Drummond’s corporation owned the Oregon radio station where Larry worked. This way, cast members from Diff’rent Strokes could appear a handful of times in Larry, and vice versa.

In the fall of 1979, Meadowlark Lemmon, formerly of the Harlem Globetrotters, joined the cast (as himself), playing a local sporting goods storeowner. And incidentally, even though it’s not as much fun as stunt casting tidbits, in the winter of 1979 the show was often interrupted or pre-empted altogether for news reports on the Iranian Hostage Crisis. By the time that international brouhaha was settled, Hello, Larry was off the air, ending its run in April of 1980.

Liberty Crossing (go90 2018, Ashley Argota, Adam Faison)

In espionage tinged sitcom Liberty Crossing, a somewhat hopeless young intelligence analyst at the National Counterterrorism Center must untangle a terror plot whilst finding his feet amongst the office’s petty backstabbing and bureaucracy – while also dealing with his interfering family.

Absentia (AXN 2017, Stana Katic, Patrick Heusinger)

Thriller series Absentia is about FBI agent Emily Byrne (Stana Katic) who, while hunting one of Boston’s most notorious serial killers, disappears without a trace and is declared dead. Six years later, she is found in a cabin in the woods, barely alive and with no memory of the years she was missing. Returning home to learn her husband has remarried and her son is being raised by another woman, she soon finds herself implicated in a new series of murders.

Arctic Air (CBC 2012, Adam Beach, Pascale Hutton)

Canadian TV show Arctic Air is a one-hour adventure series set in the booming Arctic, about a maverick airline and the unconventional family who runs it. On the ground, Bobby, the headstrong business partner, struggles to save the airline from crashing financially while Mel, the cantankerous co-owner, keeps his crew of pilots in the air. Caught in the crossfire is Mel’s hotshot pilot daughter Krista.

As the series progresses the character-based drama will deliver hard-hitting emotional stories – from the romantic entanglement of Bobby and Krista, to the conflicts that spark between Bobby and his competitors, his business partners and even his extended family. There’s a new gold rush heating up under the permafrost, and there are new fortunes of diamonds and oil to claim.